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Who’s That Kid Staging Sondheim?

WHEN people think of Broadway special effects, the first things that probably come to mind are big, lumbering spectacles like the chandelier in “Phantom of the Opera.” Such elements are designed to drop jaws, stop shows and above all draw attention. But they don’t always draw good reviews.

Sam Buntrock, the 32-year-old British director making his Broadway debut with the revival of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” wants to rehabilitate the artistic reputation of special effects. In his intimate production, live actors talk to projections, scenery darkens as day turns into night, and animation seamlessly blends into the background.

“Sometimes the job is to make the effects invisible,” Mr. Buntrock said, sitting downstairs at Studio 54, where the show, presented by Roundabout Theater Company, is in previews. Some onstage technology “has been much maligned, but I feel what we’re doing serves the piece,” he said. “It’s not an add-on.”

“Sunday in the Park,” which has one of the most beloved Sondheim scores, first opened on Broadway in 1984, starring Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin. Broken into two interlocking parts, the first of which tells the story, largely imagined, of how the Parisian painter Georges Seurat (played by Daniel Evans in the current revival) created his pointillist classic “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” while ignoring the woman he loves, Dot (Jenna Russell). The second act fast-forwards a century to the 1980s when another artist named George (also played by Evans) presents a new multimedia conceptual art piece.

In this new version, thanks to 3-D animation, the painting, currently the crown jewel of the Art Institute of Chicago, slowly comes together onstage. A sketch emerges, then color is added, and the rest gradually comes into focus, piece by piece.

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Sam Buntrock onstage at Studio 54.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“By showing the progression, you get more into the mind of the artist,” Mr. Sondheim said in an interview. “The play is about perception, and here we see the work as George perceives it.”

Mr. Buntrock is an unlikely Broadway director. For one thing, there’s his age. “He looks about 18,” said Mr. Sondheim, who also said he was shocked when he first met him at London’s tiny Menier Chocolate Factory theater, where the show first ran three years ago before it transferred to the West End. “I thought, ‘Come on — don’t give me that.’ ”

But it’s not just Mr. Buntrock’s youth that’s unusual. He has a democratic sensibility that includes a love of opera and popcorn movies. And while he has directed many shows, until around five years ago he was better known as an animator. He suggests that his experience in both animation and live performance worked to his benefit in “Sunday in the Park.” “I have a foot in both worlds,” he said, looking down modestly, “which gives me an advantage in integrating the animation.”

Mr. Buntrock, who was wearing blue jeans and a form-fitting gray shirt, has a low-key, casual style that seems more like that of an earnest graduate student than a theater director. He has had a stutter since he was 7 and confesses that sometimes he uses it to buy time while considering what to say. But even after he settles on something, he often reconsiders. “It was a dangerous thing — actually, it’s not really dangerous,” he said about an element of his set design, before stopping himself with a laugh. “It’s not like someone’s going to get killed.”

Even at his age Mr. Buntrock has had a long relationship with Mr. Sondheim’s work. A revival of “Into the Woods” in 1990 inspired him to become a theater director, and years later, while a student, he staged his first show, a low-tech production of “Assassins.” He then cut his teeth as an assistant director at the Donmar Warehouse in the late 1990s during the celebrated tenure of Sam Mendes. There he worked with directors like David Leveaux and John Crowley, and seemed to be making the right kind of connections.

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Sam Buntrock with Stephen Sondheim and the cast of "Sunday in the Park With George" at a dress rehearsal.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“There was a lot of smoke being blown around me because I was an assistant at the Donmar, and that was seen as a springboard,” he said. But things didn’t take off as planned. “I couldn’t get anything up and running. I wasn’t very good at selling myself. I was much shyer in those days. My stammer was much worse.”

At something of a loss, Mr. Buntrock, the son of an advertising man, poured his energies into animation, working for television and corporate clients, which was also much more lucrative than being an unemployed theater director. It was also something that he has always been interested in. “I knew early on the difference between Saturday morning cartoons and feature-film standards,” Mr. Buntrock said.

He continued to direct occasionally for the stage, but mostly in solo shows and sketch comedy. He worked successfully with a satirical troupe called Club Seals that incorporated fairly raw and rudimentary special effects. But Mr. Buntrock grew increasingly concerned that he was frittering away his chances at a theater career.

The turning point came in 2003 after a cancer scare (“I’m fine now”) and a bout with alcoholism. (He’s been sober five years.) “It was a very, very bad year,” he said. But by the end he had emerged with the crucial idea to mix his interests in animation and theater in a production of one of the few great Sondheim shows that hadn’t been given a Broadway revival. Inspiration hit after revisiting the score of “Sunday in the Park,” a musical about, among other things, an artist’s anxiety about wasting his talent.

“If you’ve been through a bad year, and you hear that score, it hurts, but in a good way,” Mr. Buntrock said. “It makes you feel that what you’ve been feeling is connected to something.”

The intimate show was an instant hit, receiving rave reviews. In its move to Broadway, the budget naturally has grown bigger, and so have the expectations. Is anything different? “It’s more showbiz,” Mr. Buntrock says, adding with the crooked smile of someone who seems a bit embarrassed by the term. “I mean that in the best sense.”